US, UK and NATO allies ramp up anti-Russia offensive over “cyber spying” and Skripals
By
Robert Stevens
5 October 2018
The US Department of Justice is seeking the arrest of seven Russian nationals it claims worked for the GRU, the main Russian military intelligence agency. They are accused of hacking, with the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) as the most important target, as well as wire fraud, identity theft and money laundering.
The announcement followed a coordinated blitz by the UK, the Netherlands and other NATO powers. To frame the demand for the seven arrests, the US used all the material gathered against Russia over the Skripal/novichok affair as a pedestal.
Seven months to the day since the still unexplained events in Salisbury that saw the poisoning of the Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, and the later death of resident Dawn Sturgess, the US made use of an operation carried out by Dutch intelligence in April, first announced last month, when four Russians were expelled for allegedly trying to hack the OPCW.
The narrative of the imperialist powers is that the alleged Russian attack on the OPCW was mounted because it was conducting investigations into the poisoning of the Skripals and the alleged chemical weapons gas attack by the Moscow-backed Syrian regime in Douma earlier this year. Four of the seven listed in the US indictment, Aleksei Morenets and Evegenii Serebriakov, Oleg Sotnikov and Alexey Minin, are the Russians expelled from the Netherlands.
According to the Financial Times, British intelligence tipped off their Dutch counterparts that they suspected the Russians, who they said had been organising reconnaissance around the OPCW headquarters at The Hague, after arriving in the Netherlands on…